JMP

SAS JMP is, in my view, the best package available on any platform for quantitative analysis. What makes it terrific is its outstanding interactive design. This design allows for quick and powerful theory building. I taught statistics on the university level for years and used the outstanding student version of this software and its combination of visual and mathematical analysis is truly second to none. Alas, it is extremely expensive and out of the range of vast number of potential users. It is obviously designed for the corporate sector, since SPSS tends to dominate the academic market.

Wow! February 2008 and it still isn't a universal binary. For the $1500--yes, I said FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLAR--single-user license fee, one would think SAS could do a little more on the development end, especially since there's been two new versions (6 & 7) that have come out since version 5 (the one still mentioned in the description as of this writing) in 2002 -- again without a UB upgrade. JMP is also very, very weak in comparison to SPSS -- which as a lot more sophisticated operations, comes in at $1700, and has been UB for a while now. Perhaps most importantly, very few people use JMP, which makes porting files around almost impossible. SPSS, on the other hand, is almost ubiquitous. If you're thinking about this software, I suggest you stop -- unless you really, really like expensive toys you can only play with by yourself. Don't get caught up with a bunch of proprietary files that very few others can read and which you won't be able to read unless you keep upgrading (which is also incredibly expensive).